[efindel]

Mechanically, the second edition is an improvement over the first... but I really, really wish the art was more like the first edition.

The artwork in the first edition was the first thing I noticed about it, and what made me really have to get it. I already had Champions, DC Heroes, three different Marvel systems, GURPS Supers, and Villains & Vigilantes -- I wasn't looking for another super game. But the art... the art looked like something lifted right out of a comic, even down to the narration and speech balloons. And what's more, it looked and read like it came from a good comic!

Protonik orbiting above the earth, reflecting on his responsibilities, looking down on everything -- that was wonderful. And it was appropriate to the material, placed right next to the Life Support information. The guy on his cell phone, talking about how his work was shut down because of supers battling again -- that was priceless. And the one with the battlesuit guy building his suit, thinking about how he's going to take back the streets -- that just screams "comic book origin story".

There's nothing in the second edition that matches any of those pieces, for me. Too much of the art in the second edition has no captioning, no speech balloons, or has odd captioning that doesn't look like what you'd actually see in comics. It feels like something made for a gaming book -- good gaming book art, to be sure, but it lacks the "ripped from a comic" feel that made me pick up the first edition when I first saw it.

On a related note, I wish they'd kept the "iconic" characters from the first edition -- I don't see any good reason to replace them (well, maybe some, but not all of them), and the use of the "iconic" characters throughout the first edition's core book also helped give it a comic feel -- it had continuing characters, rather than a bunch of one-shot bits.

Ah, well... it's good art. But to me, it just doesn't reach the standard that the first edition did.